Various technologies currently exist for allowing computer users to create electronic documents, to search for electronic documents, and to communicate with other users regarding electronic documents. These activities, however, are typically manually performed and completely separate from one another. Take, for example, a scenario where a user is writing a paper on dinosaurs. In this scenario, the user might utilize a network-based search engine to locate documents having interesting content about dinosaurs. The user might also separately try to locate the author, or authors, of one or more of the identified documents, and attempt to contact them to discuss their work on dinosaurs. Completely separately, the user might utilize a word processing application program to begin writing their paper. Because search, communication, and content creation are completely separate activities, this can be a time-consuming and frustrating process for document creators. Moreover, content located by search engines is often stale, which is also frustrating to users.
In addition to the inefficiency and frustration caused to users, completely separate search, communication, and content creation can also cause other types of inefficiencies. For example, and without limitation, in very large companies or other types of entities there are often two or more groups of people creating documents on the same topic, many times unbeknownst to one another. This duplication of effort can result in a very inefficient allocation of human resources, particularly at large scale.
Separate search, communication, and content creation can also result in the inefficient allocation of computing resources. For example, and without limitation, mass storage, memory, and network bandwidth might not be utilized efficiently in scenarios where completely separate search, communication, and content creation results in duplication of effort and inefficient allocation of human resources. For instance, the same or similar content might be duplicated on multiple mass storage devices or in memory. Similarly, inefficient searches might be performed in an attempt to locate document authors or collaborators. These searches can unnecessarily consume network bandwidth and other processing resources.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.